Bloomberg News

Florida Space Coast Brightens on Jobs Increase

Embraer plans to employ at least 200 people at the assembly plant and has 50 at a customer-service center it opened next door in December. Photographer: Paulo Fridman/Bloomberg

Brian Medeiros was driving a
Budweiser beer truck when he got a phone call saying he’d been
offered an aerospace-industry job 15 months after his position
at the U.S. space shuttle program was eliminated. He pulled over
and sobbed in relief.

“I started bawling my eyes out,” he said. “It was a
blessing. It was an opportunity to use every skill I’ve
developed.”

A year after the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration shut down the shuttle program, eliminating at
least 7,000 contractor jobs in the area, the employment outlook
is improving. Joblessness in central Florida’s eastern coast was
9.4 percent in June, down from 11.7 percent in August 2011, the
month after the last shuttle launch. Unemployment in Florida, a
swing state in the 2012 presidential election, was 8.6 percent
in June, down from 10.7 percent a year earlier.

Sting, Impact

“Certainly the pain is very real for those still looking
for work,” said Dina Reider-Hicks, a senior director at the
Economic Development Commission of Florida’s Space Coast.
“There has been a sting, there has been an impact. But it
hasn’t been as severe as people thought.” Some local business
leaders thought that the unemployment rate could rise to the
high teens, she said.

Embraer plans to employ at least 200 people at the assembly
plant and has 50 at a customer-service center it opened next
door in December. The jet maker has said it will create another
200 jobs over five years at an engineering facility due to open
across the street in 2013.

Boeing Co. (BA:US) has said it will create 550 jobs by the end of
2015 for a commercial crew program to provide flights to the
international space station. Harris Corp. (HRS:US), which provides
information-technology services to the government, is building
an engineering center in Brevard County that could add 100 jobs
and 300 construction positions in the next three years.

Still, many former shuttle workers are struggling to find
work.

No Offers

Francine Myers, 53, who started at the space center in
1981, lost her position as a logistics specialist in July 2011.
She’s had two job interviews and no offers since then.

Myers, who has two grown children and lives alone in
Titusville, about 40 miles north of Melbourne, tried to squeeze
as much as she could from her 26 weeks of severance.

“I’m about at the end of that,” she said over a Greek
salad at Mr. Submarine & Salads, where sandwiches are named for
the Discovery, Columbia and Challenger shuttles. “I need to
find a job.”

Myers said she doesn’t have health insurance and must take
three kinds of insulin for her diabetes, in addition to pills
for her blood pressure and thyroid condition.

In between looking for work on websites run by
CareerBuilder Inc. and Monster Worldwide Inc. (MWW:US), Myers is trying
to get a business-administration degree at Barry University’s
Cape Canaveral branch. She said a program at Brevard Workforce,
a county agency that helps retrain dismissed workers, covers the
cost.

Small Business

Her cousin, Fred Harvey Jr., took an entrepreneurship
course through Brevard Workforce after losing his job with the
shuttle program and has opened Fred’s Auto Butler Mobile
Detailing Services, a small business that spiffs up cars, boats
and airplanes.

Like many former shuttle employees, Myers, who worked on
every launch except the first going back to 1981, misses the
sense of patriotism and pride.

“I don’t care how many launches you see, every one still
gives you goose bumps,” she said. She remembers feeling her
heart sink watching the January 1986 Challenger explosion from
the porch of her grandmother’s house. She said she saw the smoke
and thought, “Wait a minute. It’s not supposed to look like
that.”

The culture of the industry has become embedded in Brevard
County since Kennedy Space Center opened 50 years ago. It’s hard
to drive more than a few minutes without passing a street named
for an astronaut, such as Ronald McNair of the Challenger, or a
space vehicle, like Apollo Road or Columbia Boulevard. The local
area code is 321, for the countdown before liftoff.

Reliably Republican

While Brevard County is reliably Republican, it’s in a
battleground state for presidential candidates. In 2008, when
Florida sided with Democrat Barack Obama, Brevard’s vote went to
Republican John McCain: 157,589 to 127,620.

Until companies such as Embraer and Boeing finish
expanding, unemployed workers face a “short-term gap” to find
jobs with pay comparable to what they received from shuttle
contractors, said Marcia Gaedcke, president of the Titusville
Area Chamber of Commerce.

“Managing that gap is the challenge,” Gaedcke said.
“From the medium- to long-term, we’ll be fine, we’ll see
growth.”

Embraer technician Medeiros, an intense, beefy man with a
small beard and salt-and-pepper hair, took the lower-paying job
at a local beer distributor “just to keep myself mentally in
the game,” he said. Myers interviewed for a position that would
have paid $41,000, compared with $55,000 she made at the space
center. She said she probably would have taken the job had she
gotten an offer.

Former Workers

Some former shuttle workers have left the Space Coast,
hurting the local economy.

The county’s foreclosure rate was 10.8 percent in May, one
percentage point more than in July 2011 when the shuttle program
shut down, according to CoreLogic Inc. It reached a high of 11.1
percent in February.

Kyra Morgan, 55, who runs a cleaning service in Titusville,
said four of her clients moved away in one week alone this month
to find jobs elsewhere.

“It trickles down,” said Morgan, whose husband lost his
job as a shuttle mechanic.

One of the biggest problems for the business community is
“fighting the perception a lot of people have that NASA has
shut down,” the chamber’s Gaedcke said.

$900 Million

In fact, NASA said Aug. 3 that Boeing and Hawthorne,
California-based Space Exploration Technologies Corp. won a
combined $900 million in contracts from the agency to design and
develop spacecraft that can carry astronauts. Sierra Nevada
Corp. of Sparks, Nevada, won a $212.5 million contract. The
agreements will add an undetermined number of jobs to the Space
Coast, the development commission’s Reider-Hicks said.

One advantage for the area is the availability of aerospace
talent. That was a factor in Embraer’s decision to assemble jets
in Melbourne and is reflected in the fact that one-quarter of
the plant’s employees have worked on NASA projects, said Phil
Krull, managing director at the facility.

When hiring former space-shuttle workers, Krull tries to
make sure they can adapt from focusing on one shuttle for months
at a time to production of up to eight jets a month. Many of the
employees bring the passion they had at the space center to
Embraer and become some of the company’s best representatives,
he said.

For Medeiros, who has two adult children in addition to two
teen-aged stepchildren living with him and his wife, the loss of
his space-shuttle job created “a big black void” in his life,
he said.

Asked about his family’s reaction when he got his new
position last year, Medeiros began to choke up with emotion
before quickly collecting himself. He said he had feared he
wouldn’t be able to get back into the aerospace industry and was
surprised when he got the call from Embraer.

“I didn’t think they would be interested in me,” he said.

To contact the reporter on this story:
Ian Katz in Melbourne, Florida, at
ikatz2@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Chris Wellisz at
cwellisz@bloomberg.net